Features
Long Night of the Soul
ADAM WASSERMAN interviews Jorge Martín, whose opera based on Reinaldo Arenas's celebrated autobiography, Before Night Falls, receives its world-premiere this month at Forth Worth Opera.
Baritone Wes Mason as Reinaldo Arenas in a production photo for the world premiere of Before Night Falls at Fort Worth Opera
Ellen Appel/Courtesy of Fort Worth Opera
In some ways, it seemed inevitable to almost everyone but himself that composer Jorge Martín would one day write an operatic adaptation of Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas’ sprawling 1993 autobiography about his life as a writer, jailed dissident and gay man in Castro’s Cuba and, later, as an exile in New York City. Martín, a Cuban-American who holds master's and doctoral degrees in music composition from Columbia University, initially resisted the idea, finding the work too episodic for the opera stage. But relentless prodding by his friends and associates convinced the composer to take the project on, and in 1995 — just five years after Arenas chose to commit suicide rather than succumb to AIDS — the composer secured the rights to adapt Arenas's autobiography. It would be another five years before Julian Schnabel's brilliant, Oscar-nominated film adaptation of Before Night Falls — starring Javier Bardem — would arrive in theaters and bring Arenas into the larger public consciousness.
Having enlisted the help of Dolores Koch, who translated Before Night Falls into English, Martín penned his own libretto and proceeded to write the opera in "three or four concentrated bursts over the course of a couple of years," he says. What followed was a decade-plus endeavor to get the work — written without a commission in place — produced by an American company. American Opera Projects performed readings of Act I, while Boston University presented Act II. Yet it was not until a meeting with Fort Worth Opera's general director, Darren K. Woods, and the company's music director, Joe Illick, that Before Night Falls appeared prepared to assume its full operatic potential.
This month, Martín's take on Arenas's remarkable life story takes the stage at Fort Worth Opera in world-premiere performances featuring baritone Wes Mason as Reinaldo. OPERA NEWS spoke with Martín by phone in April, while the composer was visiting family in Miami.
OPERA NEWS: How did you first hear about Reinaldo Arenas and his memoir, and what was it that made you think that it would be an appropriately operatic subject?
JORGE MARTÍN: Arenas's memoir came out in 1993 and it got a huge front-page book review in the Sunday New York Times. It was the lead review with a big picture of Arenas's very-handsome face. I’d never heard of him before, so I read the piece and it became something of a celebrated book among gay men. As I have several friends who are gay men, and a lot of them had read it, I knew it was a book I'd get to. But before I could buy it a friend of mine put it in my hands and he said, "Turn this into an opera." I read it, and I loved the book, but I didn't think that it would be right for an opera, because it is extremely episodic, and full of hundreds of characters and incidents — it's someone telling these stories from their life. But I kept praising the book to friends, telling them that they should read it. And I kept being told, "Oh, why don't you turn it into an opera?"
But at one session with my now sadly departed therapist he said, "Well, why don't you seriously think about this?" Interestingly, he was an opera lover — so he knew his stuff and all that. That was what finally made me sit down and think about it. What I found as inroads were two things — it’s just a great story, and then the character of Reinaldo himself is just such a great character. I could easily imagine him singing his life. So I thought, ‘OK, those are two pretty good things to build on for an opera.’ From there it was basically a matter of devising a through-line to tell as a story on the stage, which would call on what opera can do, and to create other singable characters and create a dramatic stage story.
The other thing that I found intriguing was that, as a story, the narrative is simple. It works as sort of an escape narrative, a 'How do I escape?' scenario. But it's also, much more interestingly, the idea of an individual set up against the larger political and historical forces of his time — the fact that it's so much about the Cuban people. I remember thinking 'Oh, this sounds like a chorus.’ When I reread the book, I scoured it for passages and incidents that I thought were good for dramatizing and I found a lot of choral possibilities. The chorus has a lot to do in the opera — although it's not a choral opera in the sense of Boris Godunov, where you have hundreds.
ON: It's taken a while for the opera to reach the stage. You wrote the work without a specific commission, and single acts of Before Night Falls were presented through American Opera Projects and Boston University. Was it difficult to secure a full staging?
JM: I worked really hard getting it out there to opera companies ... and you can imagine how many responses I got. Not many! I was pleased even to get people to say "Thanks, but no we can't."
But I knew there was a company in Fort Worth — though I didn't know Darren Woods then. I finally met with him in New York, when he came with Joseph Illick, their music director, in order to do auditions. I had known Joe many years earlier, so that was kind of a nice coincidence. While we were at Fairway Market, I narrated to them, at their request, what the audience was going to see, and they really found it very intriguing. So they decided to do it at Seagle Music Colony up in Schroon Lake, where Darren worked as general director. They said, "Well, we can do scenes this year," but wanted to wait until the following year to do the whole thing. I said, "Well, we really don't need to do scenes. Don't waste money on that. What we need to do is put on the whole thing." So we left it at that. Then another coincidence happened, which was that a friend, through a family foundation, and quite out of nowhere, said that they wanted to give a gift towards the production of the opera. When that came through, I called Darren and said, "Hey, we've got the money." That moved up the workshop one year. Then at Seagle they did the whole thing, and that's when Fort Worth decided to produce it. Then they said it was going to be for 2011, earliest, but they later called back and said, "You know what, we're going to do it for 2010." When I look back, given the fact that it's not a commissioned opera, it's pretty amazing, given the dimensions of it, that it’s going to be out there.
ON: I would imagine that the process of writing an opera and shopping it around on spec gives a composer an interesting indication of how tenuous the process of creating new operas can be.
JM: Yes. There were a couple of things that I knew from the get-go would be hard to sell, even though nobody would say so. I felt that an openly gay — and rather aggressively gay — protagonist would be a difficult sell, and then the whole Cuban-background history piece of it would give people a little second thought. But I thought, on the other hand, that these were really great hooks that you can hang things on. So I decided to go with that. Then, there was the whole process, as you say, of how companies decide to produce new works. They definitely want to be hands-on, and what I've learned is that it's a weird kind of alchemy, where the brew is made up of the individual personalities and tastes of the general director, meshing with whatever the subject is, and then his own board and audience, his constituency, and then the capacities of the company, and the opera house. So these things just happened to mesh with Darren in Fort Worth.
ON: In keeping with what you've just said, I'm curious about your opinion as to why there are so few operas that take gay male characters as their leads — particularly in light of the demographics of operagoers and modern opera audiences.
JM: Well, that ground was broken many years ago with Harvey Milk. But in terms of why the lack of gay characters, I don't know. Darren has done Angels in America in Fort Worth, and there's nothing that's more out there than that, and that was a great hit, it was a great success.
It’s funny, though, because, as an opera composer casting about for subjects, one of the things about this particular work is that it is so male-voice heavy. I find so often that the subjects that I'm attracted to tend to have male leads, but I'm sort of itching to write a great female role. I don't know if it's about the way the human voice is constituted, or something about the high female voice and the way it interacts with an orchestra in a house. So actually, in writing a very big, starring role for a lyric baritone, one of the challenges was, in a way, to give it that kind of star vocal luster that otherwise there's not going to be, and which, as a composer, you need.
ON: The opera incorporates a bit of magical realism into the story, in the form of the roles of Reinaldo Arenas’s muses. It seems as if this was also a decision that was meant to balance the distinctly male sound-world with female voices.
JM: There are two great operas that come to mind in the literature that are totally male — Billy Budd and From the House of the Dead. They’re basically both that way because they occur in places that are totally male, like a battleship or a prison. But the world of Before Night Falls is not necessarily that circumscribed. If you read the book, there are female characters — it's just that no one female character really plays a role throughout his life. So I wanted to have the opera partake of the wider world, which includes the feminine. I can't remember which came first, but it all sort of came together — the idea of incorporating into the storytelling something that reflected the kind of magical quality that is very true to Reinaldo's style. Then the fact that I could do this through some kind of magical characters — muses, which are traditionally feminine — occurred to me. Towards the end of the book, when he is very close to the end of his life, he apostrophizes the moon and says how close he has always felt to the moon as a presence in his life. That seemed to me very much an inspiring element, and I thought the moon would be a great muse character.
I decided I wanted two instead of just one. The sea was also a very powerful presence in Arenas’s life. Of course it happens that the moon and the sea do have this natural relationship, with tides and phases. That was nice additional gravy. Then I had these two — this pair, this couple — that could weave throughout the story. I have one of the singers portray the mother in the childhood scene, and then the Sea later on. That also created a nice connection between the association of the mother as a muse later. Traditionally some people have argued that the muses are more of a mother-type figure, because, even for female artists and writers, the muses have always been female. It's not an erotic thing — it's more of a parental thing. So the mother disappears after the first scene but is still there as the singer — a mezzo — who plays the sea muse. I introduce them towards the very beginning, after the curtain rises on the Prologue. Reinaldo basically invokes the muses, which is a very traditional thing, so we meet them right up front, and we know who they are and what kind of world we're in. Then they do different things throughout the story, they take on different kinds of roles.
Somebody asked if this opera was a tragic story, in light of how it ends. And in fact, although, yes, he does commit suicide at the end, there is a postlude where the muses appear to him and sing him what I call a lullaby.
ON: How much of a challenge was it, in light of the kind of vocal arrangement of the piece — having a largely male cast — to draw character distinction between each of the singers?
JM: There are seven principal roles, five of which are male, so I quickly went about assigning different vocal types to different characters. The first thought that occurred to me was that the role of Reinaldo would be a tenor. I decided that I didn't want that — I cast him as a lyric baritone. He's the only lyric baritone, so his sound is unique in the opera in that regard. Then there's the bass-baritone who plays the heavy, which is more traditional. And then there are three tenor roles, and each one of those is very different. There's the kind of character tenor, Pepe, who is a childhood friend and who betrays him later. There’s the role of Lázaro, who's kind of a lyric tenor. Then the character of his mentor, Ovidio, an older character, is a little heftier. So even among the tenors there are three different kinds.
And then the chorus is another presence that plays a lot of different roles also. In one scene they're the rebels, in another scene they are Cubans in an office, or are rioting outside the Peruvian embassy. At the end they're the crowd in New York City on New Year's.
ON: Having heard bits and pieces of the opera, I was able to discern Cuban rhythms and elements in the music. How much of a conscious decision was it to include those qualities, or are those merely musical elements that already contributed to your own musical voice?
JM: It was entirely conscious. Actually, before writing this opera, those Cuban elements were not part of my compositional voice, and in preparation for Before Night Falls I did a series of smaller works in which I consciously went about incorporating Cuban elements in my music as a kind of a warm-up. So the way that I incorporate Cuban elements in the music is sometimes pretty close to the surface. Other times it's a very compositionally subtle type of thing.
At the very opening of the opera, the prelude is kind of slow, and it has a piece of a little rhythmic cell, which if you just hear it by itself you wouldn't think of it as Cuban. But the rhythmic cell is the first part of the son clave. So those three little beats I use as one of the many recurring rhythmic leitmotifs, which sometimes get fulfilled or not, and here it sounds somewhat faltering. So little games like that I would play throughout, and there are definitely other very clear, rhythmic leitmotifs that run throughout.
The thing about Cuban music is that — being really this amalgam of African rhythm and European harmony and melody — the harmonic and melodic components are more often just simply recognizable as European. Therefore we don't think of it as being that distinctive. It's only when you have the rhythmic element wedded to the music that you recognize it. There are certainly chord progressions or patterns in Cuban music that have been used a lot, and there's one or two numbers in it where I draw on that.
ON: How would you describe the opera’s music to those going to Fort Worth to hear the world-premiere performances?
JM: It's so hard to try to give a flavor of something when it's an unknown entity. So you think "Ok, these are the political parameters of the story, and there's this character, and he's gay …." Some people will like it and some won't, but ultimately what we have here is an opera, and an opera can be so many things, but primarily it has to be a musical-vocal-dramatic experience. I know from my own experience what a high that can be and, for me, as a composer, my ambition is to basically give people a new fix, a new high.
One thing that has occurred to me is that I actually wrote tunes in this opera. Which is, sad to say, still a very rare thing. We've had a lot of operas that are melodic, and lyricism has finally returned, which is so fabulous. But we still don't associate the idea of new operas with tunefulness or tunes. So that's one thing that I've consciously tried to do, because it's hard to do that. I felt it was important because of the nature of, well, first of all, my own style, but also the nature of the story being about Cuba. Cuba is known for not just its dance music but just great tunes. I felt that that would be a challenge and something to make part of the musical profile of the piece. So yeah, the idea that it's got tunes — that's kind of out there. 
